


sea change

by andreaphobia



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU, M/M, Modern AU, Prison, Prison AU, angry boys, pretension - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 20:00:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1197630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andreaphobia/pseuds/andreaphobia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren and Jean find each other in prison.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sea change

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt provided by Tumblr user slutty-eren.
> 
> As always, thanks, Traci, for the moral support and everything else.

 

i. Three days after Reiner got out, the new cellie arrived.

At the sound of the buzzer the gate rolled back, and Jean looked up from where he’d been doing the crossword puzzle in an old reader’s digest. It was just before lights out on a Sunday, and it’d been raining for hours. There were no windows in the cells, but he could hear the wind; the roll of the thunder. The light that filtered through to the landing was murky grey and green like the ocean floor.

The CO squared a shoulder, shoved the new guy in, and then backed out again.  _Close up on forty_  he said and the gate slid back into place, clanging shut. Across the landing, someone yelled  _New fish. Fresh meat_. The call got picked up, the jeering carrying down the corridor and echoing through the cell units till a guard yelled for them to shut the hell up or they’d all go in the SHU.

There, in the middle of the floor, stood the fish. Arms hanging loosely by his sides, wearing denim prison jacket over ill-fitting uniform. Barely more than a kid—being twenty-four going on twenty-five, Jean felt qualified to make that judgment. Dark hair, green eyes; kind of pretty, if you happened to swing that way. Jean didn’t, but he called them like he saw them.

He swung himself down from his bunk and stuck out a hand. When they shook, it felt oddly formal, like he was being introduced to someone who mattered.

“Jean Kirschtein,” said Jean. “Been in here two years on a drug beef. Gonna be two more before I’m out. You?”

“Eren Jaeger.”

“Aaron?”

“ _Eren_ ,” the kid repeated, mouth tightening into an angry line. But Jean only shrugged.

“Not my fault you got a weird name,” he said. “So, what you in for?”

Mimicking him, Eren shrugged back. In some other context, the way his hair fell into his eyes might have been described as artful; here, it was merely scruffy.

“What do you think?” he asked, and it sounded like a challenge.

Jean raised his eyebrows. He’d never been a fan of guessing games, but—kid like this, how bad could it be? “Petty theft?” he suggested.

That only made Eren laugh as he crawled into his bunk. “That’s right,” he said. “I got twenty five to life for fucking _shoplifting_.”

Jean gave a low whistle. Sentence like that could only mean one thing. “Who’d you kill?”

No answer. Outside a bull yelled  _Ten minutes to lights out_ _._  Eren, curled up in his bunk, was staring fixedly at the wall, which indicated to Jean that the conversation was probably over.

 _Fuckin’ weirdo_ , he thought, climbing back into his own bunk. He returned to his crossword puzzle until the lights went out, and then slept.

 

ii. Jean preferred to stay indoors, citing poor weather and the general climate of violence, but for Eren, who said that sitting in a cell all day made him antsy, the prison yard held special appeal. Probably it was the novelty of everything, Jean thought. The potential for danger. If you closed your eyes in your cell or the showers maybe you could imagine you were safe at home, but only a goddamn idiot would close their eyes out in the yard.

Still, he appreciated the stories. Every evening after supper Eren came back full of them, tales about the fights that broke out or the deals that went down, and between filling out the crossword puzzle or reading, Jean listened. The kid had a mouth on him, he’d talk about anything—except for what he’d gotten locked up for in the first place. It was strange, but then again, Jean supposed everyone had something they didn’t want to talk about.

(For Jean, it was Marco and the drugs. But he almost never thought about them anymore.)

Whatever else, though, the judgment that he’d passed on day one remained: Eren was fucking weird. He swung between emotions so violently that Jean thought he’d get whiplash. Every day was a struggle, a crap shoot with Eren Jaeger of the many moods—but that was how things went, and soon it was just another part of their routine.

Sometimes in the evenings they played cards, seated across from each other on the bottom bunk. Jean always won because he cheated like hell, and Eren had yet to figure that out. This, to Jean, was what passed for entertainment.

“Again?” Eren swore, throwing down his hand in disgust. “I swear, there’s somethin’ funny going on here.”

“You’re playing with the big boys now, Jaeger,” Jean said smoothly, reshuffling, then dealing again. “All there is to it.” He licked his thumb and drew a card. “Tell you what: why not raise the stakes a little?”

“Like how?” The suspicion in his voice would’ve hurt Jean if it wasn’t a hundred percent warranted.

“Like, say… if I win this next round, you gotta tell me what you’re in for.”

Eren scoffed. “No bet.”

“Don’t be a dumbfuck.”

“Okay, fine—I stole a litter of kittens from a pet store.” He shrugged exaggeratedly. “What can I say? They were calling to me.”

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself,” said Jean in a conversational tone.

“Maybe I’ll let you watch,” said Eren. He licked his lips slowly and then sat back, grinning. His mouth shone wet and for a moment Jean thought—

Then the moment passed. Raising his eyebrows sardonically, Jean said, “I’m good, thanks.”

He looked at his hand. Another straight—how completely unexpected.

 

iii. April came and went. The going on twenty-five had gone and he felt no different, except for the knowledge that another year of his life had vanished.

There were no visitors. He hadn’t expected any.

It was strange being forgotten, but Jean thought probably it would be even stranger if he hadn’t been. Or perhaps he just couldn’t imagine what they would say to him now, two years down the line, a person whose time had been frozen. Because of Marco, he was not who they had thought he was. It only made sense for them to move on.

The kid, on the other hand, got visitors every week, and each time he came back from visitation night he was in a foul mood. He’d storm in, maybe punch the wall a few times, and once Jean made the mistake of asking, “What crawled up your ass and died?”

He didn’t mean it in a bad way, it was almost friendly concern, but Eren didn’t take it well. “Go suck a bag of dicks,” he snapped, throwing himself petulantly into his bunk. The joints rattled threateningly and for a moment Jean envisioned the whole thing coming apart and crushing Eren in the process. That’d show him.

He raised his eyebrows. “A whole bag, huh? Maybe I’ll start with yours, you little fairy.”

There was no response. Down the corridor, a CO was yelling instructions which echoed like a shout at the bottom of a tin bath. On the outside it was raining again, but on the inside it was almost dry, apart for the leak in the sink.

Jean lay in his bunk, tracing the cracks in the ceilings with his gaze, and imagined April showers. Rain that could wash away time, and turn him back into the person he used to be.

 

iv. The tattoos had been a mistake.

He told Eren as much when he’d asked. It was awful cliched tribal shit that didn’t mean anything; he’d gotten it done with Marco one night, when they were both drunk as skunks. But of all the regrettable things he’d done with Marco, this was probably the least so. (It had helped him play the part when the time came, too, and that was something worthwhile.)

He was just pulling his shirt back on when somebody grabbed the end of it to stop him. Head caught in the collar, it took him a moment to extract himself and he surfaced to find Eren staring, lips pale and slightly parted, hands still hovering in mid-air like he wasn’t sure what to do with them.

“The fuck are you playing at, Jaeger?”

“Nothing,” said Eren. “Just—wanted to look.” His voice was strange, his eyes stranger. He looked like a man possessed. “A little.”

The silence that followed was pregnant with expectation. Jean stared. It was a bizarre request, also but one that cost him nothing to grant.

He shrugged, removed his shirt once more, and swiveled in place to put his back to Eren. He heard Eren suck in a breath through his teeth, and could almost feel the heat of it on his skin. Soon  _look_  became  _touch_ , but somehow Jean said nothing. There was silence between them but it was broken by the sound of the friction of skin sliding over skin. The room was airless. Jean felt as though he was drowning.

He took that touch with him to sleep that night; the sensation of fingertips tracing the meaningless swirls of ink, of warm palms resting flat on bare shoulder blades, anchoring him to life.

 

v. There was a week when Eren got himself put in solitary. Jean, quite foolishly, thought this would mean peace.

But it was amazing how quickly you got used to things, even annoying ones. He found that it had become difficult to do the crossword without someone chattering constantly in his ear, and was quite disgusted with himself.

It wasn’t  _attachment_  so much as  _acclimation_ , he thought. You grew up breathing smoke, and maybe when you tried fresh air for the first time you’d die from shock.

The thing is, half the time he wasn’t even sure he believed the kid. Maybe he really was hard enough to kill somebody, but to Jean’s eyes he was just a cell soldier, all bark and no bite. So it came as a surprise, then, to hear that Eren Jaeger was going to be spending the next week in the hole for getting into a fight. There were no lasting injuries, but that was by accident rather than design. You didn’t start a fight in prison if you weren’t trying to hurt somebody.

 _That’s why you stay indoors_ , he thought. He held this smugly in his head but had no one to say it to, which left him with a vague feeling of discontent.

The feeling persisted throughout the week. He found himself writing these unspoken thoughts down in the dogeared corners or margins of magazines, and later ripped them out, crushed them and flushed them. In some strange way, he felt as though he had been put in solitary, too—which was patently unfair, because he hadn’t done anything wrong. He had only remembered what it was like to have someone to talk to, and that, at least, was not a crime.

 

vi. When Eren came back, he asked, “How was it?”

“Fucking boring,” Eren told him.

 _For me, too_ , Jean didn’t say.

 

vii. There was only so much variety in prison work, and laundry duty wasn’t the worst of it. In a strange, masochistic way, he almost enjoyed it—as much as one could possibly enjoy pawing through trolleys piled high with soiled clothing. It was mindless stuff, and it was something to do. Once in a while he liked to feel useful.

“I heard you locked up with that Jaeger kid,” Springer said to him one evening, over the trolley. It was fifteen minutes till they punched out for the day and Jean already had his mind on supper.

“Yeah, so?”

“So?” Springer sputtered. “ _So_? So you better watch yourself, is what I’m saying.” He lowered his voice, conspiratorial. Jean leaned in closer to hear. “Word is, he spun out and stabbed a guy in the chest, like,  _fifty times_.”

“Fifty, huh?” Jean was impressed. Stabbing someone once or twice, that was nothing; but anything over a dozen took real dedication.

“Damn right. Could be you next, Kirschtein.” Springer seemed morbidly excited by the prospect of it. Possibly not much of note happened in his cell block. For some inmates, the gang violence; the brutal shankings, all of it was just a kind of daytime TV.

“I’ll make a note,” Jean said. He mimed writing on an invisible notepad, and Springer laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d heard in years.

It seemed implausible, something blown all out of proportion, but Jean figured that every rumor had a grain of truth in it. Rec hour followed going off duty, which meant that most everyone would be out in the yard.

Jean tried to imagine waiting till after supper to talk to Eren, and found the prospect of it not much to his liking.

Cigarettes were contraband, but you could get just about anything if you knew the right people. He borrowed a light and, cradling his smoke, walked out into the rec yard for the first time in months. A couple of people called out when they saw him,  _Hey house mouse! What you doin’ outside, Kirschtein?_  but it wasn’t conversation. He could ignore it.

He found Eren over by the pile, warming up for the bench press.

“Spot me?” Eren said, between reps.

Jean sucked in a breath through the cigarette, then blew out smoke. (It was strange to be able to think now, in quite clear and plain terms, that he was sharing a cell with a killer.)

“So,” he said, watching Eren lift. “Fifty times, huh?”

The kid paused, then continued as though it hadn’t happened. “More like forty-eight.” Totally casual. “You know how rumors exaggerate.”

When he grinned, it looked almost unhinged, but Jean wasn’t sure whether it was one of those things that was only obvious in retrospect. He stubbed out his cigarette, and the ash sizzled on the damp concrete like a sigh.

“Who’d you do?”

“Some asshole.” Eren shrugged as though the name, the person, was unimportant. (Since they were dead, in a sense, Jean felt it was true.) “Tried to rape my friend.”

“Oh. How is she?”

“He’s fine.” A pause. “Well. Fine  _now_.”

Jean knew how that went.

He counted reps. Eighteen… nineteen… twenty. Pause. His lips felt cold. Suddenly, he wished he hadn’t put out his cigarette.

“—I took the fall for a friend,” he found himself saying. Like the roll of the thunder, the voice came from far away.

“Yeah?”

“He’d gotten in with a bad crowd. Doing drugs. Selling. But he was sick, too. Wasn’t going to make it another year.”

Silence. Twenty-four… twenty-five. Pause.

“I thought,” said Jean, quite slowly, the words sticking in his throat, “that he should spend that time with family.”

“Oh. How is he?”

“Dead,” said Jean.

Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. That was where Eren stopped.

(The lack of closure would bother Jean for a long time afterwards.)

 

viii. There was no such thing as private time in prison. Sometimes that meant making a choice between jerking it with someone else present, or not at all.

The latter was an untenable choice, the former an awkward one. At least Jean was considerate, in that he’d wait until lights out before starting. That way his cellmate could pretend to be asleep, not listening to the sounds of him rubbing one out.

That night it had already been dark for half an hour, which seemed a reasonable grace period. Lying on his back in his bunk, eyes fixed on a water stain on the ceiling, Jean unzipped, spat in a palm, and reached in.

He started by fisting his length slowly, coaxing it to full hardness, then ran a thumb over the head to caress the slit, and bit his lip before any sound escaped. It felt good—but only vaguely, in the sense that much-needed stress relief would. There was no outlet for his desires. He stroked himself harder, casting about for an image to hold on to, but all he could see was the water stain, a brown blotch like an upside-down clover.

Minutes passed in this fashion. And then, very slowly, filtering through the shapeless lust, he realized there were other sounds in the cell. Slightly harsh breathing, slick fleshy sounds. Maybe a muffled gasp or two.

It was Eren, in the bunk below. He could picture it now—one fist pressed to his mouth to muffle any noise, the other wrapped around his prick. Listening to Jean, and knowing that Jean was listening to him. It was… weird, like everything else that had to do with Eren Jaeger. But he was hard already, and probably it would have been even weirder to make a big deal out of it.

So he kept going.

And the truth was there was something weirdly titillating about hearing the rustle of fabric from below; the occasional breath hitching in Eren’s throat. He sped up his pace a notch, and—yeah, he could hear Eren doing the same beneath. If it was anyone else he would’ve been so turned off, but Jaeger…  _Eren_ …

He came hard, imagining green eyes and a crazy, crazy smile. And lying there, winded and dazed, with softening prick in hand, he almost didn’t notice the head which poked itself up over the edge of the bunk.

“Got room for two?” asked Eren, quietly.

Jean stared at him.

It occurred to him that maybe there was a word for the type of situation he was in. That word, he thought, was _fucked_.

“—Yeah,” he said. He reached over, pulled Eren up. The bunk creaked from the added weight. It creaked a lot more afterwards, too, but by then he had stopped paying attention.

 

ix. All he could think was that it was better than being forgotten.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are greatly appreciated! <3


End file.
